Seattle Coffee Works

… four of the most important companies in and around Seattle, hunh? Important enough for 12 German Bundestag MPs to pay them a visit.

Last night we had a wonderfully relaxing dinner with said delegation here at the cafe during their two-day stay in the Seattle area.

While the focus of the night was talk, wine and food, several of the MPs, especially the indefatigable co-founder of Greenpeace Germany and former Minister of Environmental Affairs in Lower Saxony, Monika Griefahn, wanted to try the coffee. We served some of our amazing Sumatra Mandheling (very clean, chocolaty, big body) next to the Yirgacheffe Kochere which always makes me think somebody has poured a bottle of cherry flavor over the coffee. Topics of conversation ranged from the recent Boeing vs. EADS tanker fight to why someone would leave a successful corporate career to start a coffee business, all the way to the deeply philosophical questions of state vs. society and how much government a society needs.

We were flattered and very happy that the group made a stop in our cafe.

Source for the image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vrogy/109880311/

Seattle = World’s Capital of Coffee

Seattle Coffee Works = Seattle’s Best Place for a Coffee Tasting, according to Seattle Magazine

No high-powered PR campaign involved, no money paid, no ads bought, just a great pat on the shoulders and a badge we wear proudly:

Coffee Drinking Man is out on the street now, legally, wind proof, and beautiful as ever.

While it took a good while longer than anyone could have anticipated, the wait has been worth it. The highlight of our journey was, no doubt, a conversation I had with Ruri Yampolsky, Seattle’s Public Art Director. The wonderful folks at Seattle’s Department of Transportation (SDOT) had put THE MAN in front of Ruri to make sure she and/or the Art Commission had no issues with him going on Pike Street. We quickly established that there was no copyright issue as he is truly unique. Then we got to the most important question:

Ruri: Well, I am not sure that this is art.
OK. That’s fine — I won’t take this personally. I think he is a piece of art but for the purpose of our permit, maybe he isn’t.
Ruri: It could be art but if it’s not art we won’t have to get involved.
You’re making me cry — all we want is to beautify Pike Street and pay tribute to Seattle as a coffee-drinking town. Let’s just not call him art if that makes it easier.
Ruri: Yeah, let’s not call it art.

There he is, a piece of art-isanship, all permitted and legal, and Pike Street is a little more lively. Check him out next time you’re in the area. And please let us know if you think he is a sign or art.

Before I sign off, big thank yous to all the folks who have made him possible. Windy Jeffreys for making the design, Josh Brown for sticking with this project from start to finish, through several prototypes and numerous difficult spots. The great machinist Rick for getting the shiny metal parts done. Ruri, Patti Quirk and her colleagues at SDOT for being flexible in helping to make him reality. We have been especially impressed with the responsiveness of the folks at SDOT for whom this project just meant more work than usual and who remained chipper and excited throughout our dealings.

The Holiday season sneaked up on us, silently, sometime during the torrential rains of last week. Seattle was under water, and all of a sudden we realized that the countdown had started. Of course, we’re fully prepared and ready (NOT) for the year to end. To help our dear customers and other folks interested in true gourmet Seattle coffee we relaunched our website as a version 0.5 .

Take a peek at www.seattlecoffeeworks.com. For the first time, we have a fresh list of our coffees online. And, we have samplers! The Simsch-Bui home office has become a veritable packing station; the logistics of getting several packages out per day are a wonderful new challenge.

This brings me to say a big thank you to the person who makes much of our design possible: Windy Jeffreys. The acuity of Windy’s eye, her passion to make things happen, her passion!, and, wow, her professional creativity — we still bless the day when we connected with Windy almost two years ago, of course through the random-match machine.

Last, it’s time to start signing off for the year — please keep your orders coming because soon we’ll be closing for a brief holiday (December 25 through January 1). We’ll greet you back here in the store on January 2, 2008, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

Happy Holidays, and let’s drink some coffee!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eldritch/887163040/

Every day we try to make great coffee with a smile. That’s how we start. The more we smile and the more we focus on the quality of the shot the slower we get. If we speed up it’s easy to get slightly grumpy or to lose the quality. There are, it seems, three possible combinations:

1) Speed & Quality (and grumpiness)

2) Service & Quality (and slowness)

3) Service & Speed (and low quality)

The big chains have been focusing on 3). We’re trying to decide whether our niche is 1) or 2). It’s a hard thing to do as both speed and quality are quite hard to achieve in themselves, and service, well it’s mostly an attitude thing but it also requires know-how and a lot of time. All this makes us sweat…
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roald/72577585/

We took our old new Bunn ICB Twin to its limits yesterday morning — we even got it to breathe for a moment (”temperature is too low for brewing”) despite Bunn’s claim that this piece of equipment was made for continuous brewing.

The Seattle Symphony was calling. 125 folks in need of coffee. We heard the call and delivered coffee and bagels. The musicians started stumbling in ten minutes before their first recording session started. The fall was here. I felt reminded of my time in academia, when we started our seminars again, slightly hung over from a hot summer and not quite ready to get back to normal life. (I am sure the recording turned out just as fabulous as everything I have heard from the Symphony!)

We served Vista Clara’s Signature Blend (a smooth Sumatra/Costa Rica/Colombia blend reminiscient of Dave Stewart’s past as the co-founder of Stewart Brothers’ Coffee), alongside some of Borogove’s fabulous Brazil (a mellow, sweet estate coffee with a wonderfully rich earthy personality) and some of Dave Stewart’s straight Colombia. Seattle Bagel Bakery helped with a HUGE bag of bagels, delivered as usual way before our morning shift. Dutchbike Seattle lent us a wonderful transport bike which was instrumental in navigating the 1 1/2 blocks between the store and The Symphony.

We stayed around for a little while but we missed the 10 minutes of break during which most of the coffee and bagels disappeared. We’re proud to have made the first day of, eh, Symphony a little better for everyone involved. Happy New Season, dear Symphony! Thanks to everyone who helped.

Bonus: Yo-Yo Ma will be guest-conducting The Symphony this season. He wasn’t there on Tuesday but we’re excited for his first concert with the orchestra this Saturday; of course we wished he was bringing Bobby McFerrin with him…

Tim McCormack and Dismas Smith have been roasting beans for Hotwire for a while now. In January 2007 they started a wholesale business out of a non-descript office park in Everett. Tim’s Cremona and Dismas’ Gitano have been some of our favorite Espresso blends since we reopened in May. We’re never quite sure which of the two blends we get — often when Tim picks up the phone to take our order we’ll see some Cremona (even if, say, we asked for Gitano), and when Dismas takes our order it’s all Gitano.

In the cup, both blends are terrific.

(See some sharp pictures by Lara Ferroni in the store).

There are a bunch of photos on Flickr from various awesome bloggers/photographers from around town. Check ‘em out.

We have been working non-stop since 7am of the opening day.

The party started with a call from John Repp from Komo1000. He and I had had a great interview on Friday about our concept and coffee in general. John is quite a coffee afficionado. When the story was playing every half hour on Monday morning, the hosts at Komo1000 got so excited about the prospect of good coffee that they wanted to have a mini-taste-off between some good local roast and the corporate brew in their office’s kitchen. John called Monday morning to see if we could arrange for that taste-off. With little time to spare we agreed that the only way to do this was to brew some fine Melitta drips and send them up to the station. We brewed some Vista Clara Columbia, Caffe D’Arte Velletri (alderwood roast), and a cup of Mukilteo. The taste-off was broadcast live at 8:15am on Monday. The two hosts expertly tasted the differences (as we expected).

The day progressed with a ribbon-cutting ceremony (picture). We served about 400 drinks in seven hours. The shop was packed all day. Celeste Clark and barista champion Kiril from Australia pulled many shots. The unflappable Ryan Johnson saved the day with beautiful latte art even under the pressure of high demand. Dave Stewart, Gary & Beth Smith, Neal Brown, Dismas Smith — all made a showing. We had a party. At high noon King 5 and Komo 4 camera teams appeared on the scene for the unveiling of Coffee Drinking Man. The party’s continued since…

Thanks to everyone on the team for making it happen!

Woah — we’re one day away from our Grand Opening. It only took eight months of dress rehearsal to get to this point. The cafe is now livable with its own (almost) four walls. We have a much greater selection of coffees, and most importantly I am finally in it 100%. If we fail, we’ll go down in flames. Nothing half-hearted, no more dividing time between a corporate job and the coffee passion.

And, tomorrow, finally Seattle will get its Coffee Drinking Man, which already has stirred some controversy…
If you can’t make it tomorrow, check us out sometime soon. You’ll get a coffee that’s going to blow you off your socks. Finally some good coffee around Pike Place Market — something Pipo and I were dreaming about since our first Saturday morning in the Harbor Steps’ corporate housing.

Pictures will follow, of course!